I don’t know what other ASD parents, or professionals, call the process or behaviour, but Frances almost constantly “verifies rules” or extracts them from both real and imagined scenarios — and this is undertaken very seriously.

She has been doing this since she started speaking, and her language is, as is her pattern, in the form of questions.

The rules usually pertain to danger, and always occur (to the listener) out of context.

One example, from a few days ago:

“Are cows dangerous? Well they are bigger than me, they have a strong kick. So stay away from cows, right?”

Or:

“Never eat anything bigger than you, right? It could be dangerous.”

Personally, I find it very cute, but I know that she has to learn other ways of starting and holding conversations. (She did some work on this difficulty over the summer.)

“Read to me some of what you’re reading,” my not-quite-three-year-old would say at bedtime.

When she first asked, I thought that I would seize the opportunity to read something that she would find boring enough to fall asleep to while listening: Virgil’s Aeneid.

Unfortunately, as I read on and on, she grew interested in it. She’d actually foiled my plan to induce sleep by epic poem.

“Okay,” I thought to myself. “If I’m going to read something to her, I may as well read something that interests me.”

At first, I started reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but once The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock popped into my head, I abandoned the longer poem in favour of Prufrock.

To my utter surprise, she loved it. She asked questions; she asked me to repeat words and to repeat lines and to repeat stanzas. I read through it more than once that night — then, I read it to her every night for years.

I wrote down many of her statements and questions about the poem — here are a few.

April 29, 2012 (5 years old):

Me: ‘Am not Prince Hamlet…nor was meant to be.’

Frances: I think he is lying; I think he IS the prince.

Me: Do you mean that he is more like those people than he realizes?

April 16, 2013 (5 years old):

Frances: Who is he talking to? Maybe a princess who is about to be married?

I just added a page that lists books that I’ve read in which ASD (autism spectrum disorder) or autism is featured, and beside each title I have indicated the perspective from which the narrative is written (e.g., parent, sibling, etc.)